The world has grown accustomed to mobile telephonic devices (MTD) such as cell phones and phone-based Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). These devices function in a wireless network where one or more such devices communicate using voice or data to each other or to external services. Services can include making external phone calls to land-line voice networks, making phone calls to other cell phones, leaving or retrieving voice mail message or exchanging data messages, such as e-mails, text messages, pages and others.
As such devices become more predominant in usage, it is common for there to be a vast number of messages received by the device. For example, if a device is configured to receive a copy of all email messages from a user's main email account, then the device can be a central repository for all email messages, short message service (SMS) messages, instant messaging (IM) messages, voice mail messages and other communications. Prior art graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on such devices provide limited customization of displayed icons and text for the applications, e.g. the size of the icons can be changed. While icons can be manually moved to specific location in the display, the basic layout and appearance of the icons are static until further changes are made by the user to the GUI. There is no ability to dynamically or automatically control the layout or appearance of the icons.
There is a need to address deficiencies in the prior art.